Technical Basics: Data Supplier in CCMS

Data suppliers deliver all of the values that are displayed in the Alert Monitor. They each belong to the individual system components and create monitoring objects that report values to the monitoring architecture. These values are displayed in the monitor sets.

The monitoring architecture is delivered with the data suppliers for the most important components of your SAP system and its environment and can therefore be immediately used. When starting the Alert Monitor, you can see that the data suppliers for reporting for the following components are already active:

· The host systems on which your SAP system is running

· The database

· SAP instances (application servers) and their services and components

· Components outside the system

You do not need to prepare or activate the monitoring architecture. The data suppliers in your system are either started automatically when the system is started, or are started as they are required. There are two different types of data suppliers:

· Passive Data Suppliers are started by the monitoring architecture, which is why they must be defined there. “Passive” describes the behavior of the data supplier in relation to the monitoring architecture: it does not start itself, but rather must be started by the monitoring architecture. Passive data suppliers are also known as data collection methods.

· Active Data Suppliers are started by the monitored application rather than the monitoring architecture. These data suppliers are active in their start behavior in relation to the monitoring architecture.

A data supplier writes the values for the monitored objects in a segment of the shared memory known as the monitoring segment. This monitoring data can be transferred to the monitoring architecture in two ways:

· Using a defined ABAP interface, in the case of an SAP instance ‑ a free work process is required for this

· Using a CCMS agent, for any server; the transfer is performed using a Remote Function Call (RFC)

As the connection method using a CCMS agent does not require a free work process, the access method is therefore independent of error states of the SAP instance and therefore more robust. The CCMS agents also use push technology with which the agents report alerts automatically, if the central monitoring system is running SAP Web Application Server 6.10 or above. This helps to ensure a good performance, as the central monitoring system then no longer needs to periodically query the agents for alerts. We therefore recommend that you use CCMS agents when connecting remote systems to the central monitoring system.